Hello friends. I’ve signed up for Blaugust. As you might guess from the name, it’s a challenge that takes place in August, where you blog. The original challenge was to blog every day in August. Challenges that require daily activity don’t work with my life, so I’ve set the bar quite low. According to Krikket, who is one of the people leading the charge on Blaugust this year, you get a Bronze award if you post 5 times in the month of August. So that’s my goal. 5 times, which I’m mapping to about one post a week, with an extra post squeezed in there somewhere. According to the official Blaugust blogroll, I am not a first-time participant this year. Hmm. Let me do a quick search of my blog… I can’t find anything, but who can say? Who can remember what I’ve blogged? It’s been a long time blogging. Belghast, the founder of Blaugust, wrote an intro post as his first post for Blaugust so I thought I would do likewise. Maybe lots of new people are stopping by? So hello! Welcome! I’m Kimberly. I have also sometimes been known on the Internet as Kiba Rika or Kiba. I’ve had lots of various other handles over the years, but those are the main two ways people know me. I am not Kim. Please don’t call me Kim because I will think you are talking to someone else. I’m not sure why it bothers me to be called Kim, it just does. Like Belghast, I was born in that Xennial Oregon Trail generation sweet spot. We had an analog childhood and a digital young adulthood. Or at least, I did. Really a digital adolescence for me, but my dad is an early adopter so I’m a bit unlike my age-group peers. Also like Belghast, I started this blog in/around 2009. Archives older than that are imported from elsewhere, because I have had more blogs than I can remember. For a while I had topical ones. My first blog was a personal blog, hand-coded in HTML and CSS, hosted on some old free webhost like envy.nu or something. I had a Xanga dedicated to movie and other reviews and one for my poetry. I had a LiveJournal. (Technically still do.) I’ve had blogs about crochet, theater, video games, and I don’t know what all else. But eventually I decided to just put all the things here. I’ve been extremely online for at least a quarter-century, which is why I identify as an escribitionist. This blog has had shifts in focus as my life has, so its archives reflect that. I’ve spent A LOT of time in school, so often it will be about that, especially getting my MS and PhD in Library Science. I also have been book blogging since 2007, so you’ll find a lot of book reviews in the archives, for books released as recently as this spring, and even a few interviews with authors if you go back far enough. I’m an elementary school librarian and my students are big fans of the graphic novel Amulet. It’s really fun to be able to tell them that I interviewed Kazu Kibuishi when Amulet was first published. I blog a lot about dealing with chronic illness, too. I’ve got a pile of diagnoses and they make me variably disabled, so sometimes I have a lot of energy and almost no pain, but other times I am in very bad pain and it’s a lot of work just to get out of bed. I write about how that feels and dealing with doctors. For work, as I mentioned, I am an elementary school librarian. I work with the first through fourth graders at an independent, secular Quaker school. I don’t write about that a lot lately, but I’m not sure why. Maybe because I’m just too tired? It’s a half-time job but it eats up full-time energy. In the spring I told my supervisor that my long-term goal/wish is to actually use the other half of what would be a normal person’s week for something other than recovering from the energy expenditure at work. I’m going into my second year in this job, which I love. I do help kids choose what books to read and help them find more books like books they’ve already loved, but I also collaborate with teachers to provide them rich resources to support student learning. One of my hopes is to do more instruction moving forward, maybe embed some research instruction into the work the teachers are doing so students see the skills in context rather than isolated. Last year I pulled together resources for fourth grade classes on several different forms of government, including finding examples of each form, and I learned a ton that way. Being a librarian is a great gig if you love to learn, because anytime you help someone else you’re learning something yourself, too. In addition to this job, I’ve also been a middle school librarian, academic researcher, university outreach public communications specialist/managing editor, and Latin teacher. In my time when I don’t work, I love to read and play both video and tabletop games. I’ve been a theater person and an improv comedy cult member (only kind of joking, read Bossypants) but haven’t done either of those in almost 10 years. I live with my almost-9-year-old son M, who attends the school where I work (and did even before I got the job there), and his dad/my spouse, W. W and I met doing theater when we were very young (I was in high school and he was in college) and have been together ever since. If you find someone awesome that young, you’re super lucky, and I am. The three of us have a cat named Midnight, who is a smol boy (under 6 lbs full-grown, the vet’s not worried about it) and very fluffy. We live in an area with multiple universities and a thriving local food scene, where farms that were once focused on producing tobacco now grow incredibly delicious produce. We live near our parents and siblings. Big sister/eldest daughter is my longest-standing identity and I’m not gonna lie, it’s exhausting. But I do love my people. So that’s me. What else would you like to know?